Browse all authors in Theme Directory?

[jhmonroe]

Wasn't it possible to browse by all authors in the Theme Directory before? Or filter by author? Or even as something as simple as a category page or search results page?

Currently it's only possible to browse all themes by an individual author once you drill down from one of their themes: https://wordpress.org/themes/author/adorethemes/

Request: Filter all author names (with a number next to their name showing how many themes they've made—this is really helpful info when comparing providers and cross-referencing with other tags) OR Just link to "all authors" and spit out a list of all authors on a search page.

BTW Search is not even producing results when searching known authors like Rich Tabor (I created a separate issue #149 for this)

[StevenDufresne]

I am interested to learn more about the value of viewing themes by author. How does this flow work for you? What are you thinking about when you start this user flow?

[jhmonroe]

@StevenDufresne great question!

A few reasons on how I (or anyone) might evaluate a theme in the ways they evaluate other resources to determine quality:

1. User experience: As the directory grows and the number of block themes grows, it's starting to get hard to filter thru all of them and make sense of the quality or output of the authors (without open a ton of tabs to compare dozens of themes).

2. Example: If I filter by block themes, today this is 821 themes and 69 pages. Using a combination of other filters might narrow it down a bit. Turning on "Block patterns" narrows it down to 704. "Portfolio" narrows it down to 302 and 26 pages. Still too many to sift through.

3. Keywords are all added by the authors, so like SEO-packing it can be slightly unhelpful in determining actual quality. A bad designer or someone who doesn't use the best practices I might like in constructing their theme can still load it up with keywords for the filters.

4. How we evaluate plugins: Many of us have been told that you can tell a lot about the quality of a plugin in the repository by a few things: # of installs, star reviews, how recently the author updated it, how involved the author is in the community on projects, etc. Themes are no different.

5. Authors on the forefront: There are authors who are thought leaders in the WP space and I'm always looking to see what they're doing, what best practices they're incorporating into their block themes, etc. For instance, lately I'll download themes and look to see what Rich Tabor, Brian Gardner, Mike McAllister, Anders Noren, Automattic, Carolina Nymark, and others are doing. Studying how advocates for block themes build their themes is the quickest way to get a headstart or refresh rusty memory when starting a project.

6. Possible Metadata: Being able to see even more metadata about themes in the main search view of theme directory (without having to go into the individual theme pages one by one) will help layman and front-end developers lives easier in evaluating the quality of what's in the directory as it gets more and more bloated. — Author (and number of themes after their name) — Date added (the "Latest" filter doesn't show any date metadata to users so who knows what latest means) — Number of installs (or similar data to plugin data)(this info shows on certain profile views: https://profiles.wordpress.org/melchoyce/#content-themes) — Number of files in the package? — Number of favorites? (Pattern directory has this: https://wordpress.org/patterns/)

7. Filters in combination: There's no way to view block themes + also sort by latest (or at least this reverse chrono isn't made obvious to the user). The sorting orders are not revealed to the user at all since no metadata shows to extrapolate what is the methodology. Pattern Directory has a sort by: popular, newest, oldest which works in conjunction with the top-level categories being turned on: https://wordpress.org/patterns/

8. PHP, HTML, theme.json etc: There's no way to tell (without downloading a bunch of themes and comparing) if it's a bloated old theme that someone has retrofitted with a theme.json file to become a block theme or if it's a from-scratch lightweight block theme. The directory could also have more transparency about HOW the author built the theme. The old "full-site editing" tag was the way I would previously narrow down themes to only the latest which would cut it down to a few dozen, but after the latest change, it seems to be showing hundreds of block themes now.

Currently the theme directory is too minimalist (in terms of UI) which results in it not feeling as serious as the plugin directory or easy to sift through — so it ends up feeling too overwhelming or not being a resource that is easily consulted.

In general many more filters are needed as the directory grows, and more data on authors is a start.

[jhmonroe]

PS @StevenDufresne would love to help out the Theme Directory group how I can to help bring it to the same level as Plugins Directory and other directories. My skills are in design, content strategy, and front-end WP (like making simple custom themes for clients). Have been working in WP since v3 and very excited about where it is now (have made the switch to only block themes). Just came back from WCEU!

[StevenDufresne]

Lovely! So much great information and I agree that it requires further iterations to give users functionality and controls to truly help them find the best themes.

For this iteration, meta focused on updating the front-end code to give a common look and feel to all the directories with the hope to cut deeper on the second go round. There are some design experiments that you make be interested in.

I think the next best step to get involved is to join the #website-redesign channel on wp.org slack.